The memory lives in every grown-up Chinese:
huddling in front of the television with family and friends, the snacks and
beer on the table, all eyes glued to a tiny bouncing ball on the screen as the
rhythmic ka-donk, ka-dink, ka-donk,
ka-dink fills the otherwise silent room. Table tennis, China's unofficial
national sport since the 1950s, has given millions of Chinese a taste of
national glory and prestige long before their country's more recent rise. Olympic
table tennis, in which China has won 23
of 27 gold medals, stirs a national craze that can make it feel like
China's Superbowl. But this year, though Chinese state media has covered and
re-covered the London matches just as obsessively as before, somehow table
tennis failed to evoke the same breath-holding and fist-waving of previous
years. Even before the London games, the sport's waning popularity in China had
become evident. But, just as table tennis in China was always about much more
than just table tennis, so too is its decline a sign of something bigger. As the
nationalism that once fueled this sport's popularity recedes, and as China
focuses less within and more on the outside world, its increasingly globally minded
citizens are shifting their attention to Western sports. China isn't a marginal
country anymore, their thinking seems to go, so why should Chinese athletics
focus on such a marginal sport?

The history of table tennis in China has long
symbolized, and at moments played a direct role in, the fate of the nation.
First invented by Victorian English in the 1880s, its early popularity was confined
mostly to European intellectuals and aristocrats. Then, in the wake of World
War II, as China just rose up from its century of humiliation, it absorbed this
parlor game from the imperial power and made it China's own. In the early
1950s, when the International Table Tennis Federation recognized the Communist
Chinese government in Beijing over the exile leadership in Taiwan (something
the U.S. wouldn't do until 1979), Mao Zedong decreed table tennis the national
sport, and invested heavily in cultivating competitive players. China won its
first world champion in 1959, defeating Japan on an international stage, a
symbolic repudiation of Imperial Japan's brutal 1930s invasion of China. "We
listened [to the table tennis match] on the radio with such anxiety and
expectation," recalled He Fuming, a retired journalist, of a much-celebrated
1965 match against Japan. "When Zhuang [Zedong] defeated the Japanese, he's all
everyone talked about on the street and on the buses."

Perhaps
the most famous moment in Chinese table tennis was when Zhuang Zedong befriended
an American player named Glenn Cowan at the 1971 World Table Tennis
Championships in Japan. The U.S. had still not even recognized the Bejing
government, and Cold War tensions defined the standoffish U.S.-China
relationship. Zhuang's bold gesture handed Mao a pretext for the first small
sign of détente with the United States: ping pong diplomacy. He immediately
invited the U.S. table tennis team to visit, which paved way for President
Richard Nixon's historic trip the next year.

As Henry Kissinger later said
of the 1971 match in Beijing, "One of the most remarkable gifts of the Chinese
is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous." But the sport was
popular for non-political reasons as well. In cramped urban neighborhoods or
impoverished rural areas, ping pong tables made of a concrete slate and a row
of bricks became a ubiquitous presence. Students played with their teachers,
grandparents with their grandkids, and factory supervisors with their workers. In
a society sometimes fraught with class or political divisions, the table can be
a great equalizer.

China's dominance in table tennis has grown,
since its 1988 introduction at the Olympics, into a near-monopoly. In 2008, the
Chinese teams won the gold, silver, and bronze in both men's and women's
singles, as well as gold and silver in both doubles. As international sports
writers sometimes point out, qualifying
for the Chinese national team is harder than winning the Olympics. Some
players, finding the competition at home too fierce, have chosen to immigrate
abroad. Chinese players now so heavily populate foreign teams that the
International Table Tennis Federation, fearing the practice was stifling local
talent in other countries, announced new rules
after the Beijing Olympics that make it harder for the Chinese players who
relocated to represent foreign teams.

In London, China is again so dominating the
matches that its gold medal was a foregone conclusion before the matches were
even over: in the men's and women's finals, Chinese players stood at both sides
of the tables. This time, though, once-obsessive Chinese audiences were barely
watching. According to the state sports channel, television
ratings for table tennis have plunged since the Beijing Olympics. Though
official data is still unavailable, the Chinese television rating for the
finals at the 2009 World Table Tennis Championships is just 0.5 percent, down
from above 5 percent in 2007.

"Watching these games is like watching a TV
series that has been on for 53 years, with the same plot repeated over and over
again," a columnist complained
in a Chinese newspaper, lamenting the lack of suspense in Olympic table tennis.
On Weibo, China's Twitter, table tennis is increasingly described as China's "lonely
national sport."

"The Olympic committee should cancel badminton
and ping pong. They are so boring!" Duren007 wrote in a Weibo tweet.

"Mah-jongg should be listed as an Olympic sport.
Then it will at least have a few more thousands of millions of audience,"
yushenhanyuhuanglaozhinei joked.
"It can win more glory for China than ping pong."

The
impression that the sport's popularity is declining in China can seem
widespread here, especially among young people. Once hailed as the populist
"all-people sport," it is now increasingly perceived as a leisure activity for
seniors. In street parks, retired cadres pass the ball back and forth as their
grandchildren crowd into nearby courts in Jordan sneakers to play what often
feels the new national sport: basketball.

"We
also played ping pong. But, as boys, we want something that makes us drip in
sweat," explained Wang Chen, a basketball lover and a rising sophomore at Yale
University from China. On a national level, athletes like basketball star Yao
Ming and the hurdler Liu Xiang are new symbols of China's athletic prowess.
Swimmers Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen, after their record-breaking performance in
London, sparked celebration here in Beijing, while the table tennis victories barely
raised an eyebrow.

The
once-strong link between table tennis and China's national prestige seems to be
weakening as people here move on from the old, somewhat insular ways. Even the
party's top-down management of the national athletic system has entrenched the
perception of table tennis as a symbol of an outdated China. Chinese Olympians
are handpicked by state coaches while they're as young as five or six, sent to
sports schools and honed through thousands of hours of practice. Though match
fixing is no longer standard practice as it used to be, players are encouraged to put
the team's glory above their own. "I don't feel any pressure
now," as second seed Wang Hao admitted
to the Telegraph before his final
against teammate Zhang Jike, "because we are both playing for China."

But is China's single-minded pursuit of gold
medals taking something away from the long-popular sport? It's a question more
Chinese are starting to ask. In an essay titled "Chinese Ping Pong: Winning
the World, Losing the future," blogger Ding Zhengyu argues, "Nobody likes
to watch table tennis, because there is no suspense. For a sport to have a
future in any country, having strong rivals matters more than winning medals. ...
China should abandon its top-down management of table tennis and leave it to
the market." He's not alone in losing his enthusiasm for the sport. "When I was
young I used to cheer for every medal China won. Now I started to feel the
Olympic events like table tennis and badminton are boring," user
dingyizhou_1983 wrote on
Weibo. "Behind each gold medal is taxpayers' hard-earned money."

As China has become more educated, more middle
class, and more worldly, its tolerance for heavy-handed state management of
athletics, and perhaps other areas, is running low. With the enormous rise in
popularity of sports such
as basketball and soccer -- if not necessarily more Western, then certainly
less intrinsically Chinese -- table tennis might soon descend from its
long-held place at the center of Chinese sports to the back alleys and street
parks where children play and seniors relax.

When three-time world champion Zhuang Zedong
first met the American player Glenn Cowan on a bus in Nagoya in 1971, he
presented Cowan with a silk-brocade scarf, bearing the image of a Chinese
landscape, as an ice-breaking gesture. Glenn, a flamboyant hippie with a floppy hat over long locks,
later gave Zhuang a T-shirt with a peace sign and the words "Let it be" written
on it. After 40 years, these words seem to be finally reaching China's ping
pong tables.

About the Author

Most Popular

After a year of uncertainty and unhappiness, the president is reportedly feeling more comfortable—but has he really mastered the job?

It was a fun weekend for Donald Trump. Late on Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe, the outgoing FBI deputy director whom Trump had long targeted, and the president spent the rest of the weekend taking victory laps: cheering McCabe’s departure, taking shots at his former boss and mentor James Comey, and renewing his barrage against Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump’s moods shift quickly, but over the last week or so, a different overarching feel has manifested itself, a meta-mood. Although he remains irritated by Mueller and any number of other things, Trump seems to be relishing the latest sound of chaos, “leaning into the maelstrom,” as McKay Coppins put it Friday. This is rooted, Maggie Haberman reports, in a growing confidence on the president’s part: “A dozen people close to Mr. Trump or the White House, including current and former aides and longtime friends, described him as newly emboldened to say what he really feels and to ignore the cautions of those around him.”

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

A new six-part Netflix documentary is a stunning dive into a utopian religious community in Oregon that descended into darkness.

To describe Wild Wild Country as jaw-dropping is to understate the number of times my mouth gaped while watching the series, a six-part Netflix documentary about a religious community in Oregon in the 1980s. It’s ostensibly the story of how a group led by the dynamic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh purchased 64,000 acres of land in central Oregon in a bid to build its own utopian city. But, as the series immediately reveals, the narrative becomes darker and stranger than you might ever imagine. It’s a tale that mines the weirdness of the counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s, the age-old conflict between rural Americans and free love–preaching cityfolk, and the emotional vacuum that compels people to interpret a bearded mystic as something akin to a god.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop that includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law-enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

For years, the restaurateur played a jerk with a heart of gold. Now, he’s the latest celebrity chef to be accused of sexual harassment.

“There’s no way—no offense—but a girl shouldn’t be at the same level that I am.”

That was Mike Isabella, celebrity chef and successful restaurateur, making his debut on the show that would make him famous. Bravo’s Top Chef, to kick off its Las Vegas–set Season 6, had pitted its new group of contestants against each other in a mise-en-place relay race; Isabella, shucking clams, had looked over and realized to his great indignation that Jen Carroll, a sous chef at New York’s iconic Le Bernardin, was doing the work more quickly than he was.

Top Chef is a simmering stew of a show—one that blends the pragmatic testing of culinary artistry with reality-TV sugar and reality-TV spice—and Isabella quickly established himself as Season 6’s pseudo-villain: swaggering, macho, quick to anger, and extremely happy to insult his fellow contestants, including Carroll and, soon thereafter, Robin Leventhal (a self-taught chef and cancer survivor). Isabella was a villain, however, who was also, occasionally, self-effacing. A little bit bumbling. Aw, shucks, quite literally. He would later explain, of the “same level” comment:

Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal to Trump that his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.